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Zombie Nation
Death. It's the political word of power these days. Death panels. Death Book. Accusations that Democrats are "playing the death card" in their mourning of Sen. Ted Kennedy. Death is the "it" word. Death has dominated, even controlled, American political discourse this summer as a signal part of incredible, mind-numbing clap trap, particularly on health-care reform.
Now I know why. It's the Zombies.
Zombies, to define them properly, are dead folks who climb out of their graves and eat the brains of the living. They were definitively portrayed this way in Night of the Living Dead.
If you feel like the drum beat of death is eating your brain this summer, it turns out you're right. That's what Zombies do. And there are a surprising number of Zombies around in 2009.
Earlier this year, in Austin, Texas, electronic road signs that usually contain messages of caution about road conditions changed. Instead of the usual safety messages, the signs began to read "Caution! Zombies Ahead!" or "Zombies in Area! Run for Cold Climates" or "Nazi Zombies." Computer hackers had gone to considerable trouble to override these password-protected programs that run the messages on these kinds of road signs. Highway authorities were not amused.
I came out of a hotel in Boston recently and ran into a crowd of hundreds of Zombies walking peacefully toward the harbor. No murderous attacks or cases of brain eating were reported. These were, apparently, just young people who liked to dress like Zombies. Still. Revealing of our times.
Dressing up like a Zombie and walking around may be fun, but it is also a peaceful and yet powerful statement that reality is not what it appears to be, and that much of American society is now mindless. Brain dead.
Remember that when computers are programmed to send repeated e-mails to shut down a Web site -- as recently happened to Facebook and Twitter -- it is called a Zombie attack. Mindless repetition of computer generated e-mail is a form of zombism. It is a clue to how alienating it can be, this electronic age with the mind-eating drone of electronic communication coming at you from all directions, all the time.
Zombies have gotten to be so noticeable, even Nobel prize-winning economists like Paul Krugman write about Zombies.
Really, Zombies are all around, wreaking havoc with society, but everybody is pretending not to notice. That, at least, is the premise of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, a new book out this spring that is a collaboration between the dead woman, Jane Austen, and a living (i.e. non-Zombie) author, Seth Grahame-Smith.
Grahame-Smith places the rigid, mannered society that Austen described so wonderfully in her delicate prose over an outbreak of zombism. Apart from being incredibly funny, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies as a novel is very revealing of the effects of our wired world. It is eating our brains. And people refuse to see it. They'll accept the craziest stuff rather than admit their brains are being eaten.
The "Death Attacks" of the conservatives in this long summer of 2009 are enormously revealing of how our wired society can be manipulated to fuel anxiety and fear, and how people will buy into that.
That's why we have to see the young people in 2009 dressing up like Zombies and getting together as good news. They are engaging in a unique protest because they don't want to have their brains eaten by mindless, death-worshipping hate-speech.
The hundreds of young people dressing up in Zombie outfits and getting together in Boston and around the country are doing so because they long for community, for face time with each other, for some form of relationship you don't tweet.
To take back our political discourse from the "Deathers" we need to start there, where we always start to rebuild human community. We put in the face time.
Perhaps in all the progressive cyber-politicking we forgot that. It's time to remember the fundamentals of moral community. Be present to each other.
By
Susan Brooks Thistlethwaite
|
August 31, 2009; 5:50 PM ET
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Posted by: smitisan | September 3, 2009 10:51 AM
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A few years ago, a summer anthology series called "Masters of Horror" had a brilliant segment by Joe Dante called "Homecoming". It featured a war-mongering President and his sleazy advisers telling the public that "if our brave fallen soldiers could come back, they would vote to continue the war until the job was done." Well, the dead soldiers DID come back as zombies three days before Election Day. But they didn't want brains. They wanted to vote. So they were allowed to vote. They voted against the war-mongering President. When the President nullified their votes and claimed victory, the zombie vets did just what soldiers have always done - called in reinforcements. You had zombie soldiers from WWII, WWI, Korea, the Civil War, and other conflicts pouring out of the cemeteries to make sure that the votes were counted correctly. Look it up on Netflix. It's singularly brilliant. And Bob Picardo does a fantastic job as the adviser inspired by Karl Rove.
Posted by: Athena4 | September 1, 2009 6:09 PM
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I do not always agree with Susan and often do not respond to her posts. However,I agree with her totally, this time.
My take-away from her post is that she is uncomfortable with the manipulation of folks by those (especially religious conservatives) who should know better, but are taking advantage of a cultural malaise in which people willingly surrender truth, reason, and curiosity, in favor of ideological crutches.
Thus, she laments, "And people refuse to see it. They'll accept the craziest stuff rather than admit their brains are being eaten."
I agree with that. I cannot, otherwise, fathom why people refuse to seek varied sources of information; why they think that a certain media outlet is truthful even when every other credible, independently verifiable, source is saying otherwise. The sad thing is that they are loud and emotional--and oblivious of their ignorance.
But, then again, except for the loud and emotional part, so are zombies.
Posted by: MGT2 | September 1, 2009 12:52 PM
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"...and that much of American society is now mindless."
The main reason American societal discourse is so mindless is the number of rules prohibiting honest discussion of our most important issues... those related to multi-culturalism and other behaviors correlated with demographics.
We're supposed to celebrate diversity in our neighborhoods, even though neighborhoods aren't really intended to be diverse -- households of young singles, of families with children, and of seniors, are better off living among similar neighbors with similar community behavioral expectations. Are we culturally enriched listening to thumping music blasting from inside a car whose driver has so graciously rolled down his windows to serenade us? Or having immigrant families slaughter chickens in their backyards?
For most of this century many European nations offered generous welfare because they could correctly assume that their people wouldn't take payments they didn't need. Then immigrants came in without any such self-constraint.
There's an important debate about gender roles in the workplace. And somehow the voices that point out the 23% pay differential is NOT for the same work don't get nearly the hearing as the ones who blame it on discrimination. When Larry Summers suggested there might be legitimate reasons for differential accomplishment in the hard sciences, there was 100 times as much talk about whether he should have said as there was about whether it was true.
Why do we have all these rules? Let me suggest that it is because the argument for universal equality is so easy to refute that the only way to win it is to silence the opposition.
Political Incorrectness is:
Free Speech
Free Minds
Free Economy
Free Society
=Zombieism
Posted by: WmarkW | September 1, 2009 12:50 PM
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Dude, until very recently most people had chickens in their backyards. These are minor annoyances compared with what a lot of those immigrants are trying to get away from. Sounds to me like you want everybody to live by your rules, everything set in perfect order and nothing changing, which is the very definition of a death trip. And your little equation there, freedom = zombieism, say what? No wonder the kids are indulging in a little theater, trying to get people like you to look in the mirror they hold up.